Hi Vector crew!I've been using Vector since 5.9 and I think it is a fab distro! I have tried and installed VL 7 RC1 on my Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S6120D and it works flawlessly, after 5 days of texting I haven't experienced any app crash or system crash. Only hibernation will not work. Your work is great! I simply live Vector, and that is why I am posting this.

Someone in the Vector development must suffer from the MacUbuntu sickness, I believe. What makes you think that if you make it look more as Mac then as Vector, people will like it? Do you know which people use Vector? I bet they are people who pick their distro before they decide. I bet they are not those who have Unity environment installed on all other machines. Producitivity is what matters if you decide for Vector. If you make thinks blink and hide and show up all around the screen, you loose these people. That's what I think.

I know you can change the look after a while of poking around, but why make it default? Do you think, if you do not change the look you will lose popularity?

I also have to agree with kolaloka and m0e. In a world of choices, it would be nice to see some kind of easy "theme switcher" (i.e. desktop customization switched) that would allow a user to point and click the style/theme they prefer (and I'm not talking about XFCE's themes but the desktop layout theme). First thing after installing the test candidates I end up disabling wbar/glxdock/cairodock and putting the taskbar/etc on the bottom, then I can feel comfortable again.

I've not tried any VL 7, so I'm working from a few screenshots or mostly from description:

The look is close to what most who don't (yet) config will want. It has its drawbacks in available screen and speed, but it's probably a good set for those who stay mostly "out-of-the-box".

We who want something unlike everything else are harder to satisfy. Best bet in this case is a "Light" that's even more minimal than we've seen released so far. Make it even easier to just add what we want from there, the way we want it.

And now for an opinion which must be the only correct one, as it is mine -- it's been said a few times in backchannels, irc, in private, etc., but should be said out loud:

Do Light First!(well, after 7.0 as it's so close to release and all . . .)or perhaps an "almost-light" to which a few things would be added to get Light itself. Adding quite a few to the same base would get STD, etc. Use this base for all packaging. I'm not the one to know, but it seems this would make some things easier for the devs and more satisfying to a wider user audience.

As for STD, past releases have a higher user-satisfaction than I'm used to seeing from unixish. 7 seems to be more along the same line, but "more more". Which, even though it's not to my taste, is almost certainly the right direction. STD users are used to a lighter standard than we're seeing now, but that's the way interfaces are going. This would mean some switching flavors of VL, but the "standardness" of all flavors would be increased by working from a pre-made common base, and the number of flavors needed wouldn't increase; perhaps the number would decrease, or which variety was for what use would be clearer.

I am fine with the current theme of VL7RC. It did not look at that Macish to me as Mac is not about floating bar. If you don't like the Macish way of theme you can change with in a few click. Cairo-dock can be disable at start up too.

Maybe what VL can do is provide a few more different non-Macish theme that can be change easily.

You're generally right, in VL it should be the user's decision which theme he/she wants, but as you have noticed, the majority of the people here don't want fancy themes, which is a democratic decision. And it'd take again space in the ISOs, and if the user isn't experienced in how to delete them, on his HD.

I can only agree to keep this fancy stuff out, if a user wants fancy themes they should be installable as additional package per Gslapt.

Roarde, to release the Light Edition first would be good for me because my computer needs the Light Edition On the other hand, I think it would be better to do it as usual because then we could make the decisions about which packages will be left out and which not, as there come some new packages replacing the old ones every edition.

On a new release the first thing I do disable dock for good in /usr/bin since to me it's a nuisance. Then remove gimp totally since I have no use for it and it uses up so much space, takesfor ever to open when it is set in thunar as the first choice for picture viewing.